Tablinum

“ It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.
At the monk’s other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance. ”

“ After the death of the aged403 Livia, Agrippina and her son Nero acted in such a way as to give an opportunity to their enemies; they courted popular favour, and their friends openly advised them to take refuge with the armies on the Rhine, or to take sanctuary with the Senate and invoke the protection of the Roman people. Meanwhile Sejanus had in A.D. 25 formally begged Tiberius to confer upon him the hand of Livilla, the widow of his son Drusus. Tacitus gives what profess to be extracts from the letter which he addressed to the Emperor on the subject, and from the reply which he received. ”

“ I am bent on what is bad for me, I avoid what I know to be good for me; I am fickle enough to be in love with Tibur at Rome, with Rome at Tibur. After158 this ask him how he is, how he manages his business and himself, how he gets on with his young chief and the company. If he says ‘well,’ first congratulate him, and then don’t forget to whisper just this little bit of advice into his ear, ‘Our treatment of you, Celsus, will depend upon the way you treat your own good fortune.’”
Other letters to Bullatius, to Albius, to Municius, to Secius, to Lollius are much in the same strain. ”

“ A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.
We reached Tabor safely, and considerably in advance of that old iron-clad swindle of a guard. We never saw a human being on the whole route, much less lawless hordes of Bedouins. Tabor stands solitary and alone, a giant sentinel above the Plain of Esdraelon. It rises some fourteen hundred feet above the surrounding level, a green, wooden cone, symmetrical and full of grace—a prominent landmark, and one that is exceedingly pleasant to eyes surfeited with the repulsive monotony of desert Syria. ”

“ As a general, as a statesman, Tiberius stands, if not in the first rank, then at the very top of the second, and he deserves this additional credit, that public life was distasteful to him, power had no attraction for him, and had he been at liberty to choose for himself he would have lived in seclusion, a student of literature and natural science. We see in him, in fact, the best type of Roman, the best example of that peculiar character by which Rome rose to be mistress of the world. ”

“ Augustus soon fell ill and returned home, but Tiberius remained to take his first lessons in war under the able and ingenious Agrippa. The Romans wisely flung their young men into active life at a very early age, and those who had it in them to learn, had every opportunity of learning. Four years later Tiberius, barely of age to manage his own affairs according to our ideas, was put in command of the expedition which penetrated Armenia, and awed the Parthians into a surrender of the captured standards. ”

“ Parents and Childhood of Tiberius The connexion of the Claudian clan with Rome was referred by the Roman historians to the very beginnings of her history; they had no doubt of the antiquity of the event; it was only debated whether this Sabine stock was received into the community on the Tiber at the suggestion of Titus Tatius, the consort of Romulus, or four years after the expulsion of the Kings. The headquarters of the Claudians were the region round Tusculum, in which town its chiefs had a fortress; their domain gave its name to one of the later electoral divisions of the Roman territory. ”

“ The presence of the worthy Tigellinus seems to smack of Tiberius. Sejanus would hardly risk his billing and cooing with his royal sweetheart by such a presence. But, whatever be the reason, she seems to agree wonderfully with the arrangement. Time will soon show everything.’
Having climbed up to the level road above, a very few minutes brought them upon the verge of the little town of Capreae, when Tigellinus swerved to the left, which caused them to avoid the houses. This turn led them once more back to the south shore, or rather to the steep cliffs which formed the coast-line. ”

“ These events throw much light on the condition of the Roman army at the time, and upon the characters of Agrippina and Germanicus. The latter, though a far more formidable rival than Agrippa Postumus, had been invested with Proconsular power at the request of Tiberius on his accession. Previously he had only been a legate, a lieutenant-general in command of the troops on the German frontier; he was now Governor of Gaul as well. It is not customary, for usurpers who have recently mounted rickety thrones to add to the powers of those whose rivalry they have good reason to anticipate. ”

“ Cousin Claudia was found guilty of the offence with which she was charged; but Agrippina persisted in her grievances. She fell into ill-health; Tiberius visited her; she received him at first in silence, then burst into floods of tears. She bewailed her loneliness, and begged him to find her a husband; she was still young, she said; marriage alone would relieve her from the contumelious position in which she found herself; there were plenty of men in the State who would not disdain to welcome the wife and children of Germanicus. ”

“ It is interesting to note that the most fashionable of these schoolmasters, and the one who made the largest fortune, was a man who, in the opinion of the Emperors Tiberius and Claudius, both good judges, was totally unfit to be entrusted with the charge of youth; while the one of whom it is recorded that in his old age he sank into extreme poverty is Horace’s old friend, the freeborn Italian Orbilius. ”

“ We may dismiss once and for all as unfounded, and indeed absurd, the stories of unmentionable obscenities and hideous cruelties practised by the Emperor upon his lonely island. No man after reaching the age of sixty-eight could suddenly fling himself into such an orgy of lust as is described by Suetonius, and then live for nine years, the thing422 is a physical impossibility. Again, Tiberius, though always stern, had never been cruel. Instances of his humanity are not wanting during his residence at Capreæ ”

“ Tiberius himself had no motive for committing such a crime; only the perverse inconsistency of a Roman historian could be capable of attributing to the same man reluctance to accept power, and complicity in a crime whose object was to secure the undisturbed enjoyment of that power. Whoever was responsible for the death of Agrippa Postumus, Tiberius certainly was not; but Livia, the friend of Herod, whose life had been spent in pushing the fortunes of the Claudians, was not a woman to be frightened by the murder of an inconvenient aspirant. ”

“ The authorities consulted by Tacitus, among which are included the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, who was born soon after the mutiny somewhere near Cologne, ascribed the recall of Germanicus to the jealousy of Tiberius. The inconsistency which is involved in giving larger powers and greater responsibility to a dangerous rival does not strike them. There was every precedent for dreading the influence of high official position in the East upon the mind of an ambitious proconsul. Sulla had marched upon Rome from the East ”

“ The language which Tacitus here uses is not the language of an experienced official working under Trajan with the records of a century of the Empire behind him, but the language of a reactionary of the reign of Tiberius. The breed of Romans who could see nothing in greater Rome but a field for plundering in the name of governing never quite died out; even in Trajan’s reign there were probably more aspirants than offices, and many discontented men, who thought that there were not sufficient opportunities of promotion. ”

“ Tiberius was probably still too young to attend Octavian on his Eastern tour after the battle of Actium, but when he was only seventeen he accompanied him to Spain, and there took his first lessons in the field, just as Octavian himself had previously been trained under Cæsar. A Roman was considered to be of age when he was sixteen, and he was quickly tested by being called upon to undertake minor responsibilities. In all departments of public life Tiberius had the advantage of the example and precept of the best authorities. ”

“ From the first he objected to the exaggerated language of obsequious persons, and demanded to be addressed as Dominus by his slaves, Imperator by soldiers, Princeps by the rest of the world. A Senator who flung himself at his feet and endeavoured to grasp his knees with an oriental exuberance of subservience suffered a rude fall, as Tiberius instinctively jumped back out of his reach. In a like spirit he checked the adulation which the Senate were prepared to heap upon Livia, and discouraged every attempt to invest her with the dangerous attributes of an Empress Dowager. ”

“ Piso and Plancina proved to have miscalculated the affection of the legions, and an attempt to recover Syria by force was defeated by Sentius, who gave the unhappy candidate for power ships and a safe conduct to Rome.
Agrippina meanwhile had traversed the seas and arrived at Brundisium with the vase containing her husband’s ashes early in the year 20 A.D. The illness and death of Germanicus had excited much feeling in the city and Italy, though we are not bound to believe in the dark suggestions of the historian that the populace had assumed the complicity of Tiberius in his nephew’s death. ”

“ Although he had been thus set aside, Augustus had been sufficiently anxious about his welfare to request Tiberius to adopt him, when he himself adopted Tiberius. Whatever may have been the real temper and the real pretensions of the young man, one thing is certain: immediately after the death of Augustus he was put to death upon his island, and the centurion on guard reported to Tiberius that his orders had been obeyed. ”

“ Livilla never married Sejanus, but her attempt to marry him supplies a clue to the labyrinth of plots in the Imperial household. If the principle of heredity was to be recognized, the heirs to the throne were Livilla’s407 son, the younger Tiberius, and Agrippina’s sons, the former representing the Claudians, the latter the Julians, and the situation was repeated which had existed when Tiberius and his brother had represented the Claudians, Caius and Lucius Cæsar the Julians. ”

“ The policy of Tiberius was the only sound one for the provinces, and the sole objection to it was an objection which he, if he had been a suspicious ruler, might have felt to be a strong one. There was a danger that the men who stayed in their provinces long enough to feel their strength might be tempted to set up an independent government. This danger Tiberius preferred to risk, and that he did so acquits318 him of the charge conveyed in the insinuation that he was jealous of the enjoyment of power by a number of persons. ”

“ Paterculus belonged to the class of professional soldiers and administrators whom the Empire called into being, or to whom at least it gave a position which they had not hitherto enjoyed. In his eyes the Empire was good, and its rulers were good; and while he is profuse in his admiration of the heroes of the old Republic, and can pay as high a tribute to Cicero as to any supporter of the Empire, he is no less commendatory of the men who were brought to the front by the new order of things. He does not single out Tiberius as alone worthy of praise ”

“ The exceptional health which Tiberius is said to have enjoyed to an advanced age does not favour the idea that he was intemperate, and indeed we are told that from the age of thirty onwards he prescribed a regimen for himself without consulting his medical advisers, which was remarkably successful. He was free from the tyranny of the lusts of the flesh, he was equally free from avarice, a point repeatedly insisted on by hostile historians; power in itself and by itself had no attraction for him ”

“ Agrippina was not an intriguer, she was too boisterous, too self-confident for intrigue; but she was none the less dangerous: a woman of rights, conjugal rights, maternal rights, ancestral rights; an injured woman, the daughter of an injured mother, a woman whose virtues it is pleasantest to contemplate when exhibited in the bosom of another man’s family. Tiberius did not take her sufficiently seriously ”

“ The Family of Augustus The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling. Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the succession and his life ”

“ Tabnit married his sister, Am-Ashtoreth, priestess of Ashtoreth, and had issue, two sons, Esmunazar II., whose tomb was found near Sidon by M. de Vogüé in the year 1855, and Strato I. Esmunazar II. is thought to have died about B.C. 400, and to have been succeeded by his brother Strato, the Proxenus of Athens, who reigned till B.C. 361. On Strato’s death, his son, the second Tabnit—known to the Greeks as Tennes—mounted the throne, and reigned till B.C. 345, when he was put to death by Ochus. ”